Terascale Graphics–ATI’s new RV770 GPU

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ATI’s R600 chip, which found its way to market in the Radeon 2900 XT, was something of a disaster. It was late to market, hot, large, and didn’t perform as well as expected. Fortunately, the company really came around with the RV670. It was a derivative chip that mimicked the R600 design in many ways, but fixed a lot of problems and shifted down to a 55nm manufacturing process. The result was a chip that, for its small size and low power consumption, delivered pretty good performance. Combine that with a few price drops and some hefty driver improvements in the last few months, and the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 cards are good buys. ATI was back on track.

But Nvidia is nothing if not aggressive, and though its G92 chip is larger and more expensive to produce, price reductions for their popular GeForce 8800 GT cards made them the better choice. ATI needed to do something dramatic with their next architecture to remain competitive and put Nvidia on the defensive.

That’s exactly what has happened. The RV770 chip offers substantial improvements in performance per watt, performance per mm^2, and just plain general overall performance. It’s relatively small at around 260mm^2, not as small as RV670 (~190mm^2) but smaller than G92 (~330mm^2). It’s fast, and priced to move. The Radeon HD 4850 will come in at around $200, and is such a dramatic improvement over the Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 8800 GT that it has forced Nvidia to move their GeForce 9800 GTX price down to match.

In this article we’ll focus on the new GPU architecture. Reviews of the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870, with benchmarks, will come later. Continued…

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